#60
DoNotTrack, Windows AI, GPT-4o, I/O 2024, Gemini Family, OpenAI resignations, UnstabilityAI, Chameleon, Binance.in?, MEV Exploit arrest, EIP-7706, Apple Pencil Pro, Deep Lake Water Cooling and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 60th!
📰 Read #60 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #60 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
💬 Slack will train an AI model for a chatbot from Customer data for applications such as emojis and channel recommendations. No text generation as of now though. If you wish to exclude your data from their models, email (as workspace owner) to feedback@slack.com with your workspace URL and the subject line “Slack global model opt-out request”. TBH, this feature should have been an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out by default.
🖲️ Apple and Google are working together to spec out the “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” for Bluetooth tracking devices that make it possible to alert users across both iOS and Android if such a device is unknowingly being used to track them.
🪟 A Surface & Windows AI event will be held on Monday, May 20th at 10:00 PT / 13:00 ET / 22:30 IST, and as per a leak from Dell, it will focus on new ARM laptop chips and longer battery life. Microsoft is also holding its annual Build developer conference from May 21st-23rd, so it looks set to be a busy week for Windows on ARM announcements & everything AI.
✨ AGI Digest
💣 Turns out, the gpt2-chatbot we were all seeing in the LMSys Arena the last few weeks was OpenAI’s newest child GPT-4o. In a well-thought strategically-scheduled announcement, just a day before their competitor Google’s I/O, the team released the multimodal GPT-4o and the demo blew our minds, especially the overly-excited voice. The text capabilities are available in the API and the ChatGPT app for free (I see no reason why you would not use ChatGPT now). Oh, and the image generation capabilities? Go check the “Explorations of capabilities” sections of this page and get hyped already.
GPT-4o is apparently the best model released by OpenAI RN | Source: openai/simple-evals 
GPT-4o, which BTW also uses a new tokenizer breaks the typical quality/throughput curve | Source: Post by @ArtificialAnlys 🌐 Google’s I/O ‘24 happened
Gemini now has 1.5, Flash, Nano, Pro, Veo over Sora, Gems over GPTs, Ask Photos, and more. They also released Firebase GenKit and tons of more support for AI in all the tools they had. Here’s an official Recap post.
Source: Post by @dejavucoder 
The Gemini Family gained some super-cool improvements, the 1.5-Flash being the most impressive one | Source: Gemini Technical Report
🏢 Company Updates
⛴️ OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya and Superalignment Lead Jan Leike resigned over disagreements about AI security, safety, and societal impacts among others. What’s next for them? We’re yet to find out. Maybe they continue their work independently or get roles at other research labs.
Source: somewhere on internet ⚖️ Stability is Unstable (not surprised) and is looking out to sell itself off. The company held discussions with at least one potential buyer in recent weeks as it faces a cash crunch. It is also becoming increasingly conservative in open-sourcing its models these days as well, with SD3 (announced in Feb) still not being open-sourced till now.
🤝 OpenAI and Reddit shook hands bringing enhanced Reddit content to ChatGPT and enabling Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to its users and moderators. OpenAI will also become a Reddit advertising partner. Only a Grok and 4Chan partnership can save us now. With the StackOverflow deal last week and the Reddit deal this week, OpenAI is trying to make data its moat through exclusive partnerships.
⚓️ Model Drops
🚢 After DeepSeek-V2’s MLA (Multi-head Latent Attention) received widespread attention, the team released a smaller DeepSeek-V2-Lite with 16B total params, 2.4B active params, trained on 5.7T tokens which outperforms DeepSeek’s 7B dense and 16B MoE on many benchmarks.
🦎 Meta presented Chameleon, a family of token-based mixed-modal models for generating images and text in any arbitrary sequence; which even exceeds the performance of Gemini Pro and GPT-4V on a new long-form mixed-modal generation evaluation.
🔐 0x Digest
🔙 Binance gets approval to operate in India, after blocking it in Dec 2023.
⛽️ EIP-7706, another week, another “new transaction type” by Vitalik (on his proposal spree). Vitalik proposes a new type of gas fee specifically for calldata, making transactions with large data, but small computations cheaper. This kinda aligns with the Multi-dimensional gas pricing roadmap too. (People complaint a lot about Ethereum moving slower, well someone is taking action)
💰 Peraire-Bueno brothers arrested for stealing $25M worth of crypto in an advanced kind of exploit in April 2023. The brother reportedly exploited a bug in MEV-boost (software used by most validators to extract MEV), which allowed them to peek into the block content in the mempool before they were validated, the full heist seems to be months long planning but took 12 seconds to execute.
🌋 El Salvador mines 474 BTC ($29M) using its volcano-fueled geothermal power plant. They have 20 potentially active Volcanoes, it’s a city in the middle of Volcanoes.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🧾 Remember we mentioned how S3 charged a user millions due to 4xx requests. Amazon did a prime delivery this time and now S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes.
🩰 Chrome Team introduced the
moveBefore()API which preserves DOM state across element moves & reparenting. You can check it out in Chrome Canary here.🔖 Prosopo introduced Branded Types through which you can create “branded types” in TypeScript to differentiate types that have the same structure but need to be treated as distinct types, ensuring precise type checking and distinction where needed. It is available as an npm package.
What brings us to awe 😳
✏️ The new Apple Pencil Pro can cast real-time shadows of the tool you use on the M4 iPad all with tilt and roll. You have to watch the video to see how bonkers it is.
🤯 Prafulla Dhariwal, the co-creator of GPT-3 and GPT-4o was a gold medalist in the International Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy Olympiads! Reminds us of a popular Hindi Proverb “होनहार बिरवान के होत चिकने पात“.
Prafulla’s high-school achievements | Source: Post by @kesaridhwaj
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🧩 You can use “git add -p” (p for partial/patch) to commit only the parts of your file.
🎭 Git uses the three terms
staged,cacheandindexinterchangeably for the staging area. You can use—staged,—cachedand—keep-indexand they would have the same effect in your command.✈️ The airplane may not be necessary for safety reasons, but it can help prevent disruptions to cell service on the ground. [Video]
🏖️ The Deep Lake Water Cooling System or DLWC is a deep water source cooling project in Toronto, Canada. It takes cold water from Lake Ontario and uses it as a heat sink to cool buildings located in downtown Toronto.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔍 Semantic Finder: Semantic search right in your browser using transformers.js
👣 Wiki Journey: Visualizes your daily Wikipedia adventures as a graph.
🎧 headphone-morse-transmitter - Send Morse code by pressing ⏸️ ⏯️ ⏮️ on your headphones
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
👀 Glance: A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place (why bother, going to different places, when you can ignore them all at once).
😶🌫️ tracer: A VSCode extension to measure type complexity within a project. It is WIP so be careful, you can get it here. (it is the fastest way to make your TS file red).
💨 GPTFast: Accelerate your Hugging Face Transformers 6-8.5x. Native to Hugging Face and PyTorch.
🛑 Hide Google AI Overviews: Hide Google’s Gemini-generated Search Overviews. Why would you, anyway? It’s such a convenience and time-saver.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🐕🦺 Community is a Tamagotchi, on how communities are hard, and unpredictable but are necessary.
🐯 The endangered state of normality by DHH, expressing his sorrow over “it’s now socially desirable to be considered abnormal”.
🤔 How to be a Messy Thinker by Paras Chopra, a good read on why Messy thinking is better than clear thinking.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.”
— Zig Ziglar
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A shipped tons of code this week, had a little off-screen time utilized it to meet up some folks over weekends & was lucky enough to grab lunch with Nibbler P. Apart from that he’s going through adulting & sad that he couldn’t ship this one on the expected time.
Nibbler P visited Bangalore this week, met a lot of friends this week, played games, watched movies, had good food, and most importantly, taught his friends how to prepare a good cold brew; all without losing out on work. An absolute W!
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻